'A quarter of a century of collaborating'

‘Sean and I have written psychological thrillers together under the name of Nicci French for nearly 25 years now - a quarter of a century of collaborating, of entering the other's imagination and exploring the world together. Writing is hard: writing with another person is really, really hard. The argument with oneself becomes also the argument with the other, in a way that's intimate and vulnerable and unexpected but also messy and complicated...

Indeed there's something scarily self-exposing, wounding, even humiliating about passing a pulpy, half-formed text over to another person to edit, to change, to erase. To write with your partner is to find things out about their subconscious - possibly unwelcome things.'

Nicci Gerrard, who with her husband Sean French has written Day of the Dead and an astonishing 21 other highly successful novels under the pseudonym Nicci French, in the Observer